Composting the think tank

Last week, I wrote about composting the analyst, that familiar figure, standing slightly outside the world, trying to understand and frame it. That posture has served me well but it’s starting to feel insufficient. So I find myself asking: what might come next?

I am a recalcitrant, recovering sense-maker. So like an addict, I keep returning to the same habit of applying my mind, my analytical instincts, my urge to connect dots, to try to make sense of the world as it unfolds. Since I don’t spend my days deep in data or on the ground in all the places where the future may be emerging, much of my orientation comes from listening to others, to those who observe closely, think carefully, write well and try to articulate what is happening and what it might mean.

Over many years, I have followed many of the familiar voices in the pages of the usual newspapers. On world affairs, Thomas Friedman, Janan Ganesh or Sylvie Kaufmann. On economics, Martin Wolf, Gillian Tett or Larry Elliott. On the state of the planet, Johan Rockström. On the Global South, Fadhel Kaboub. Chandran Nair for an Asian perspective. Heather Cox Richardson on all the crazy things happening in the United States. Etc.

But beyond the prolific columnists, I find myself returning to a small number of generalists for more profound insights. People who work across domains, who notice patterns, who are able to stay close to reality as it shifts, and still see things that others don’t, and find language to express this. And as it happens, over the past week or so, three of those voices have published longer pieces. Each offers a reading of the moment we are in, and a way of thinking about our times.

The first is Nate Hagens. In his recent Frankly: What to do while the world falls apart, on his podcast and video series The Great Simplification, he argues that we have reached a point where further diagnosis risks becoming a distraction. We broadly understand the nature of the crisis. The question now is how to act within it. He begins with the personal: Get your inner house in order, stay grounded. Then he moves to the relational: Find your “island of sanity”, your small circle of people you trust, and with whom you can make sense of what is happening. From there, he points to a more structural shift which few acknowledge fully: We are no longer in a world shaped by cheap and abundant energy, where growth can be the goal of everything. That changes everything.

Against this backdrop, Hagens offers a map, structured around six fronts of intervention that must unfold in parallel and across different time scales. Infrastructure and the management of physical systems. Poverty and displacement. The protection of the living world. Civic resilience and governance under stress. Meaning, culture, and shared narratives. And the shape of economies in a post growth context. These fronts are deeply interdependent, and they cannot be addressed one at a time. To make things even more difficult, we are building what comes next while the current system is still in place, so the work happens inside a system that is already under strain.

The second is Jordan Hall. After a long silence, he has returned with an updated version of a paper he first wrote a decade ago, along with a series of new essays under the title The Coming Great Transition. His core argument is that we are entering a civilizational shift that cannot be understood through the usual lenses of politics or economics. The systems we rely on are not just failing in parts, they are losing coherence. At the heart of this is a breakdown in how we make sense together, and how we coordinate action in a shared reality. He begins his essay by bringing in a powerful and unsettling layer: the rapid emergence of agentic AI, which is accelerating the breakdown. He describes a world of “networks of AI-empowered individuals”, where capabilities that were once centralized become widely distributed (and free). Our existing social infrastructure, he argues, is not built to handle this level of disruption. The result is not just faster change, but a more fundamental destabilization of how coordination happens at all. In a recent piece, he takes this further, arguing that the crisis is not only institutional, but also about meaning and value. Something more fundamental needs to shift in how we understand what matters, and how we relate to each other. I find that this direction points to something that is often overlooked. At the same time, his framing leans heavily into religious, and at times explicitly Catholic, language, in what he calls “The Divine Economy”. I can follow him part of the way. But I am not sure that the path forward for me leads through his Church.

The third is Otto Scharmer. In a recent piece titled Holding the Gaze Steady, he turns attention to the inner dimension of this moment. While much of our focus is directed outward, toward systems, crises, and events, he points to the importance of how we meet what is unfolding. There is, he suggests, a need for a discipline of attention. The capacity to stay with reality as it is, without turning away or collapsing into distraction. He frames this partly through his earlier concept of presencing, the ability to sense and actualize emerging futures. But in this piece, he introduces the shadow side, what he calls absencing: when fear, denial, and fragmentation pull you away from reality, narrow your field of perception, and reduce your ability to respond. He also offers a simple but powerful reminder: “Systems are broken; people are not.” If the failure is systemic rather than personal, then the work is less about fixing individuals and more about what he calls soil work. The conditions that allow different ways of seeing, relating, and acting to take root. From there, he gestures toward something larger. A need for what he calls “vertical literacy”, the ability to read and work across different levels of reality, from the visible structures of systems to the deeper patterns of thought and attention that shape them. And he also raises the prospect of a new “Axial moment”, a period in which deeper shifts in how we understand ourselves and the world become possible. So his contribution is not a roadmap in the conventional sense, it’s closer to a practice, a reminder that in a time like this, the quality of our sense-making and awareness shapes the quality of our response.

Taken together, these three perspectives point in a similar direction. We are no longer in a moment where clearer analysis, or more brain-power, will resolve the situation. The multifaceted challenges we face are entangled, and moving at different speeds. Action is required, but action that is aware of its context. Coordination is needed, but there cannot be a single center. And “when times are urgent, let us slow down”, as Bayo Akomolafe reminds us.

And here, I find myself thinking about a different image. The loom. If the world is coming apart in the ways described by Nate, Jordan, Otto and many others, then the work ahead is to begin toying with the threads. Different fronts, perspectives, forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing.

This is what I (together with my friend Jan de Man Lapidoth) have started to call the Inquiry Loom. We think of this as a counterpoint to the think tank. A familiar intention, turned into a different way of working. Think tanks - and trust me, I know them well - are built on a particular promise: Gather expertise, crunch the numbers, apply rigorous analysis, frame the problem correctly, write well, and produce insights that guide policies and strategies, and shape the future. It is a beautiful idea. And in simpler times, it often worked.

But the world and the entangled systems we are now in do not yield so easily to analysis, and can’t be broken down into parts. In hindsight, perhaps this should not surprise us given the many unexpected turns of events. So we need another approach, a different place in space and time.

That is what I mean with the Inquiry Loom: A space where thinking and doing move together, where multiple strands are explored in parallel, where the warp, the weft and the emerging image are explored, where different forms of knowing inform each other.

The aim is simple. Create enough shared orientation that action becomes more grounded, more connected, and a little less blind. And where (to return to Nate Hagens’ starting point) the ‘me’ stays grounded, and the ‘we’ is found. A practice that can take shape in many places; A loom, and a few threads that are held together long enough for something to begin to take form.

This article is also published on Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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